George Henry Soule

“ Looking abroad, he searches for an historic current which seems important enough for him to throw himself into. And soon the labor movement, as reflected in strikes, in manifestoes and prophecies, fills his eye. Here are a multitude of people who also feel discontent, who have a worthy cause, whose onward march is massive and continued enough to bear a sort of grandeur, especially in distant perspective which obscures details and confuses colors. For him the immensely complex British Labor Movement becomes the famous and inspiring Nottingham program of the Labor Party. ”

“ Three-quarters of the people who come from other economic classes to help them have their own axes to grind. The other quarter are ineffectual fools. They lead the rank and file off on impractical wild-goose chases. They spoil union discipline and create dissension. Their attitude is intolerably patronizing. They find comfortable berths for themselves and then from their security preach to the wage-earner with a wife and family on the necessity of sacrificing all in warfare against the established order. Labor can fight its own battles without these college upstarts. ”

“ And yet the engineer finds himself a less and less dominating force in industry. He no longer controls his own time, nor determines the direction of his own efforts. Like a blind Samson he turns the mill for others, often far less strong than he.
The engineer has remained too completely an engineer. While he has been working with machines and materials, others have mastered the human machine in which he is no more than a cog. ”

“ Whether the intellectual has any close contacts with the labor movement or not, the opportunity always is before him to understand it as well as possible, and to spread that understanding in whatever society he happens to move. A scientific and broad approach to the struggles of labor, if it can be made to permeate those classes of the community who are usually fed with calculated misinformation and actuated by heated prejudice in the presence of strikes and other labor troubles, will do much to make possible intelligent progress toward a solution of the gravest of modern problems. ”

“ Yet a person who is unfamilar with the concrete machinery of trade-unionism, who has not wrestled with its problems at close range, and who has not understood the heavy responsibilities which rest upon the shoulders of a trade-union leader, is as venturesome in attempting to advise unionists about matters of policy as a raw college graduate would be in criticizing the technical aspects of management in a great industrial enterprise. No one who has not received a thorough education in the labor movement is fitted to assume any of the functions of technical trade union leadership. ”

“ WHAT LABOR SOMETIMES EXPECTS OF THE
INTELLECTUAL.
Naive members and officers of the unions sometimes have as exaggerated expectations of the intellectual as he has of them. Here is an educated man come to help them. He has been to college and hence knows everything. He knows what is the matter with the world. Give him power and he can do away in a jiffy with poverty and oppression. He has written for a newspaper, and so he can see that the newspapers at last print the workers' side of the case in full. ”

“ There is nothing labor dislikes more than philanthropy. There is nobody whom the union official despises more in his heart than the "parlor socialist" who is so anxious to help that he will do so for nothing, and whose help is so valueless that it is not worth paying for. Fair professional fees symbolize a sound relationship between the union and the technician—they establish the fact that the technician is there to serve, not to patronize, the union, and thus have a salutary effect on both parties. ”

“ The day of the labor editor is just commencing.
Newspapering is a trade. Avoid the set schools of journalism, training for the commercial press. Get job after job as reporter or copyreader on six or eight papers and one news agency in as many cities, including a metropolitan paper, a big small-town paper, and one in a state capital or in Washington. Learn something about the business office—the advertising revenue and circulation—and about the printing plant of each paper you work on. Study the news agencies. Your ambition is to lose your job the minute you have made good on it. ”

“ In a large sense and in the long run all professions and sciences benefit the community as a whole, and whatever benefits the community benefits labor, which forms such a large part of the community. In this sense there is an almost unlimited scope for service in the professions by those who are sympathetic with the labor movement. Certainly nobody is fitted to undertake important work in any social service unless he does understand the labor movement, and unless he participates to a high degree in its aspirations. ”

“ The great majority of these "traders in ideas," as Barbusse has it, have not only had a passionate desire to serve labor in its immediate struggles, but to assist the worker in his age long battle toward a worthier status—toward a higher order of industrial society.
In the early days of the labor movement, the intellectual was of chief assistance to the workers in interpreting labor to itself and to those outside its ranks; in inspiring the movement with confidence in itself ”

“ There is one aspect of the labor movement, moreover, which is likely to take by surprise the intellectual who is unfamiliar with it. He will probably be unprepared for the intricacy and difficulty of its daily functions, or for the technical skill demanded of its practical leaders. Seen closely, it is not chiefly an affair of meetings, strikes and speeches. A successful trade union is a complex organization with a highly developed government of its own, dealing with the life of industry in a hundred details. ”

“ One or two active members of the rank and file of a local union, expressing their opinions at meetings or as delegates debating on the floor of district or national conventions, can do an immense amount of good, unappreciated it is true, but still worth while. And who can be more influential in arousing interest in workers' education, cooperative stores, labor papers, than active men working at their trades? ”

“ I think the intricate job a labor leader has should lead to the conclusion that the intellectual should go through the same process, i.e., work in the industry for a year or two—preferably immediately after college—not only to get the common touch and to strengthen his decision about staying in that kind of work, but mainly to give him self-assurance and the necessary technical knowledge. ”

“ Most people are interested in petty things, most of them prefer roundabout alleys and sideshows to straight progress along the main highroad. Heroic moods are not stable. The labor movement moves, but sometimes more like a glacier than like a race-horse, sometimes more like an eddy than like a cataract. ”

“ In these two years you will happen on your quota of labor stories to cover. The machinists, the railroaders, the miners, the printers, or some one piece of the trade union movement gets more and more of your interest. Put on overalls, break a bone or two, live lean and fight around inside your fellows' union. Beside observing what they don't read, you will learn what men live for and what little they work for. ”

“ Even those members of a union who are idealistically inclined will drop out if they do not see results. Although, to my mind, a trade union has a great and idealistic mission to perform, it must on the journey towards its ultimate aim solve many of the workers' problems. These though seemingly small, are very important for the preservation, solidarity and success of the labor movement. Workers will fight the most bitter and important strikes with great enthusiasm and sacrifice. ”

“ Then you will see that your every effort on this path bears with it fruit in abundance, and this sublime harmony once established between your actions and the dictates of your conscience will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.
"The never-ceasing struggle for truth, justice and equality among the people, whose gratitude you will earn—what nobler career can the youth of all nations desire than this?" ”

“ With trade union status, you will be leaving the local union in the direction of your real job—the labor press—probably via the road of publicity man in a strike, or in an organizing or defense campaign. You will work with six leaders and disagree with five. You will learn to assert that independence of judgment which is the backbone of any sound press; and to practice that cooperation which abides by the mistakes of fellow workers. ”

“ There may be just one reason why potentially good teachers would hold off from going into teaching as a business. And that reason is connected with the existence of bad conditions. Private schools are often controlled by ultra-conservative financial, social or ecclesiastical interests. Public schools—in which the demand for teachers is greatest—are run largely by politicians. They are conducted without social idealism of a high type, too often by a lot of persons in the administration and among the teachers who regard teaching as a tough job rather than as a social opportunity. ”

“ I believe that the most important way for intellectuals to be of service to the labor movement is for them to become part of the group which they wish to help, to start life as manual workers, to take part in the affairs of their local unions, and to take their chances on being elected or appointed to administrative offices in their unions. This way, of course, applies largely to men and women who are not many years out of college and who have normal health and strength. ”

“ It is true that men and women who have not risen from the ranks are in most unions neither eligible to handle nor capable of handling such important affairs of the unions as the formation of new policies, the making of contracts with employers, the managing of strikes, or the extension of the jurisdiction of the unions to unorganized fields. This does not mean, however, that college graduates are incapable of managing the basic functions of trade unionism if they go through the same training—though of less duration—as do all union officials. ”

“ Engineers have usually been merely the instruments of employers in getting more work for less wages out of their employees. But unions have an opportunity to demand a useful science of economics, and a socially-minded and serviceable group of engineers. There are numerous other professions, the members of which are now chiefly employed by corporation and business executives, but which might be equally useful to labor. ”

“ Those are subjects which are only just beginning to be taught at a few law schools, yet the lawyer who intends to number labor unions among his clients must know them if he is to do good work.
The law of industrial disputes is at the present time in the process of rapid growth. It is fast being molded by judicial decisions and is becoming a branch of the law more and more important to the community as a whole. Its growth along more equitable lines can be assisted only by the skillful and able presentation of the unions’ side of the controversies which constantly arise. ”

“ But it is not anyone's habitual attitude; assumed too consistently and too long it may become a posture which is cramping and even inhuman. At any rate, the intellectual who has a romantic picture of the labor movement should remember that the rank and file of those who compose it approach it from a different ground and with a somewhat different purpose. To a manual wage-earner the movement may be a spectacle, a drama, but it is also something more immediate and intimate. It is likely to be presently embodied in a trade-union. ”

“ He can sow the seeds of dissatisfaction with the present anti-social organization or lack of organization of the nation's economic processes and thereby prepare a more tolerant hearing for the representatives of labor and their constructive programs. He can set people of his natural environment thinking open-mindedly and constructively and, in so doing, he perhaps is just as useful to the labor movement as he would be in propagating definite doctrines. ”

“ In the fields of trained technical assistance labor ought to expect much of the intellectual, and by expecting much it will help the sympathetic intellectual to educate himself properly to render a genuine professional service. The intellectual can better aid the union by doing his own job well for the union than by trying to do the union’s job for it. ”

“ As an outpost of intelligence, of good will, of enlightenment, the intellectual can render an invisible but a difficult and highly useful service. It is here, perhaps, that the majority of intellectuals with an interest in the labor movement will find their true function. ”

“ The best way to understand the labor movement and to help it, they say, is first to become a manual worker and to join a union as a member of the rank and file.
A small number of intellectuals have done this with great profit to themselves and have subsequently been able to interpret labor's attitude with much more sympathy than they could otherwise have done. Manual labor is salutary for anybody, whether he is to work with the labor movement or not; and any intellectual worker will derive benefit from an occasional vacation from his desk and typewriter. ”

“ Disillusionment and bitterness set in; he cannot find a way to be useful, the labor movement is slow and tortuous and he will have none of it. At the same time he may find himself incapable of making even the sacrifice involved in living from year to year on the same income as the average skilled wage-earner, to say nothing of losing his liberty and life in the Cause. ”

“ He visits a doctor when he is sick; he does not argue that the art of doctoring is the perquisite of a manual worker. When unions become involved in litigation, they naturally employ lawyers. But only recently has it occurred to union officials that when they are faced by difficult economic or industrial problems—as they are constantly, owing to the very nature of a union's activity—, when they have controversies with employers in arbitration proceedings or in the open arena, they might go to an economist or an engineer for technical counsel or representation. ”

“ The intellectual, then, may expect of the labor movement a real significance in spite of all disappointments, and he may also expect of it, as of all significant institutions rooted in history, a tough fabric of custom and behavior to which the only fruitful approach is one of inquiring respect. ”